What’s up, what’s down and what are you not sure about?
Let us know what you set up lately, what kind of problems you currently think about or are running into, what new device you added to your homelab or what interesting service or article you found.
I finally finished my first iteration of my Minilab including a very smooth migration from the old server yesterday so I can go to the service side of things again. I plan to get some kind of selfhosters VPN for external access to stuff that’s not exposed to the internet, I’ll have to investigate which one.
Weirdness: My Authentik instance had a PostgreSQL upgrade prerequisite in order to update it.
I’d followed instructions 3-4 times completely unsuccessfully and had to keep reverting to backup.
So, I gave up for a couple weeks and left it be in order to get over my frustration.
Yesterday, I followed the instructions again. As far as I can tell, I did nothing different than I’d tried previously and it worked first try and then I was also able to upgrade Authentik.
NOTE: The instructions aren’t exactly difficult! So, I don’t see how I’d have gotten it wrong!
NOTE: The instructions aren’t exactly difficult! So, I don’t see how I’d have gotten it wrong!
Dude, don’t feel pregnant. It took me an embarrassingly long time to wrap my noodle around Caddy. Seriously, I just couldn’t grasp what was going on in the Caddyfile. Then, after extensive trial and error, I happened upon one tutorial that changed everything. Now it’s so simple for me, but at the time, I felt like a complete dumbfuck.
It’s always crazy how that happens sometimes and after weeks of banging your head, everything just ‘clicks’ when you’re exposed to the information in the way that works best for you!
Dude, don’t feel pregnant.
Context clues, I assumed this autocorrect was some variation of crazy/bad/dumb? :-D
was some variation of crazy/bad/dumb?
No, no, no. I wouldn’t call you crazy or dumb. It was meant as ‘don’t feel singled out’ or ‘don’t feel like you’re the only one’.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to insinuate you were being insulting!
“Don’t feel crazy/bad/dumb, I’ve had the same thing happen to me!” is a pretty common phrasing in my region to show sympathy and understanding and I thought that’s what you had meant (and it sounds like for your area, ‘pregnant’ serves the same general purpose!).
“Don’t feel crazy/bad/dumb, I’ve had the same thing happen to me!”
There you go. As far as ‘my area’ I didn’t grow up in the US or any particular area. I grew up around the world and multiculturaly, so there is no telling where I picked that up at. LOL
I recently setup a full matrix server. What I am currently worried about is my server. I am currently shopping for a used dual Xeon server. I am hosting close to 40 docker containers on 2 1 liter PCs with very low specs. I would love to bring it all in house to a single server with a separate NAD which I do have currently holding 60 terabytes of storage space.
My problem is that I’m moving in the not so far future and I don’t know where to put my server. Physical security is important and if someone gets into my house, takes the computer and leaves, it’ll be worthless due to encryption. But if it’s in somebody’s datacenter (co-location or whatever), they could be forced to monitor my traffic, tamper with my system, and I’d have to entrust the key to somebody in order to boot the system and decrypt the drives should it restart for an update or for any other reason.
I’m considering asking a friend to host the homeserver and reimburse them for a better internet connection (fiber) + electricity costs. But I’m not sure they’d be up for it.
How would you solve the problem?
Myself right now I’d probably take it with me - in fact that’s that I’m planning to do in a couple of months - but it sounds like my needs are a bit less than yours, and i can do some stuff just over LAN and on the ‘server’ (which is also a laptop) itself.
For more, I think I’d also ask a friend like you’re thinking.
I did that before with a relative - just had to ask them to restart the server every now and again!
About trusted encryption keys, I did it with a simple password for boot encryption, that my relative knew, so in the event of theft it’d still be hard for thieves to get anything; but after boot I’d ssh in and unlock the second disk with my own password, then start up the services.
What do you actually need to run on your server? I’d look into downsizing. A single small form factor computer or even a newer Raspi can do a lot these days.
My problem isn’t the hardware, it’s that the place I’m moving to will have a bad internet connection. My current homeserver has stuff like a CI (currently being tested), a builder for software (compiling rust, C/C++, go, and whatever else), immich, nextcloud with an extension to download from youtube and other sources (basically to circumvent geoblocking of multiple friends and family), and it could be expanded to host other services e.g a seedbox. All that stuff needs good hardware and a good connection.
Yep - while only drawing a fraction of the power and creating almost no noise
I finally bought a tiny PC to replace my aging APU border router/firewall (OpenBSD), so I’m trying to wrap my head around building a router currently inside the network that it will be protecting.
I have Debian installed as hypervisor, Incus, and sticking with OpenBSD for the firewall.
pfmakes too much sense to me too switch to firewalld. I’ll also move the network-related containers off my main lab host once this is up and running.Latest thing is my server was hard locking up randomly every couple days. Finally thought to check IPMI and it was triggering a correctable ECC error on a specific stick of RAM.
I figured maybe the first couple errors were correctable by the ECC RAM but then they just got worse and caused the lock up.
Pulled the 2 sticks in that pair and so far so good. I’ll survive just fine with the remaining 192GB of RAM lol.
Also switched from my old Dell box with Opnsense to a Linksys MX4300 running OpenWRT, saves me about 20W and its fun to try something different.
Up: My unraid server with media library, emby and my kids Down: the fiber internet line into the house that the contractor working on our siding snapped. No one is upset so the system is working.
I’m working on self-hosting my own LLMs.
I realized there are things I wanna talk about and research but I don’t want to send it to open AI. Frankly I feel gross about how much I’ve sent to open AI. My desktop is a beefy gaming rig that I don’t use for gaming much. I have a 20thread core, 64gb ram, an Nvidia gtx 3060 and 5 spare TB so why not.
- I keep a few ollama models downloaded and I’m slowly getting to know them and what they can do. Gemma seems to answer the fastest so I’ve been using that. Deepseek is like the reasoning button on chatgpt.
- I use openai-whisper to transcribe meetings I record using OBS. It’s really slow so I have a cronjob transcribe all my meetings for that day overnight.
- Open Web UI is a fantastic LLM frontend. It provides tools, rags, web searching, and model ranking all as a simple to use UI.
- My desktop has a Wireguard server which makes it easy to use my OpenWebUI on my phone.
Now I want to work on giving the LLM access to my Google calendar so it can create reminders for me. I’m sick of forgetting to think about remembering to do things so I hope if I can just ramble at the LLM about what I’m doing or what’s on my mind it can organize my thoughts. What else are these LLM actually for?
Everything is running and I’m not making many changes because work got hectic. I have a few projects I’d like to tackle once I get time:
- finish migrating to podman
- get a new drive to test migrating to microos
- get more media to finally eliminate Netflix (SO is still clinging to a few shows)
- find a smaller box for my NAS - currently in a massive ATX box, but I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg just for space savings
I finally finished setting up my Nebula network! An overlay network, as opposed to a true VPN, but excellent for flexibility and remote access. For anyone wanting maximum control over your network with excellent performance, I highly recommend it.
Check out apalrd’s blog for a great tutorial if you’re interested.
Today I learned that for some reason some DNS servers don’t like SRV records, so had to troubleshoot it when people were unable to log onto my Minecraft server that is on a non-default port.
I set up my old laptop as a home server, with a vps as reverse proxy via nebula. It runs Mint - strange for a server but that’s so it can still be a laptop. Syncthing keeps it in sync with the more portable laptop.
The ‘server’ now runs immich, which I can use super fast from the laptop itself; a bit slower if I connect with nebula over the LAN (it’s firewalled off from the LAN generally); or still pretty decently via the VPS on Https - and that VPS proxy means the family phones can connect with the apps easily.
Immich runs in podman, with some help from Lemmy about how to set that up.
And filebrowser makes it easy to share files or allow uploads with/from family around the world. With caddy on the VPS, ufw on the server and nebula in between, it’s really easy to add in something like filebrowser on a new subdomain.
Next is to try some other podman containers, or set up mqtt and owntracks.
How are you finding immich? I got it running on Ubuntu, and it’s fine on the server, but the android app keeps lagging and crashing.
I’m liking it. I’ve had no problem with the Android app, but then I don’t use it a lot, nor do my 10k pre-shrunk photos compare to some people’s collections here.
My only complaint is that two accounts don’t share great if you want to share face data etc. or to have a shared album show up in each others’ timeline.
Edit to add: Also because it lacks editing, I think my new workflow is going to have to be keep the photos separately still and edit/sort them my old way, then put them back in an external folder. I still want to do external folders generally because I still want my photos organised my way on the file system, but I was hoping to gradually sort/delete/edit in Immich to make the workflow more relaxing. Maybe I’ll still do some of it - deleting and I think it can rate - but I haven’t worked that out yet.
I installed Jitsi Meet on my YUNOhost server and am very impressed. It works really well and needed basically no setting up after installing.
Having electric stability issues this week in Bangkok - several 2-3 hour outages, which are too long for a UPS to cover the gap. I have several mid range but older PCs running docker, virtualbox, etc for various things including a postfix server for the family email, immich, QBittorrent, pihole, paperless, huly, postiz, a Minecraft bedrock server, a flightradar24 ads-b collector, and a variety of other homegrown projects.
Thinking about getting some or most of this over to a service like hetzner, perhaps even splurging on a baremetal dedicated system.
Recently I’ve been reading about/trying to learn qemu and proxmox, but don’t understand them yet. Is that where it’s at for managing a bunch of your own VMs? Or kubernetes/k8s?
I’ve been a little out of the loop for a few years and of course coming back up to speed IT wise judge take weeks. Looking for recommendations on offloading my home stuff to a cloud that I control.
I’ve used a RV/Marine deep cycle battery attached to a UPS before, that would certainly give you enough for 2-3 hours on most setups.
Proxmox runs Qemu under the hood. It’s the current favorite for VM management.
I wouldn’t bother with k8s unless you’re deploying services in high availability, or groups of related containers.
K8S is a whole different approach and I find it to be a lot more complex, but you would not need virtual machines. If all your applications are running in containers anyways, you could consider it. Finding a good solution for persistent storage is probably the most important design decision.
proxmox
You will enjoy Proxmox. When you get it all jammy, check out the Proxmox Helper Scripts: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/
Thinking about getting some or most of this over to a service like hetzner, perhaps even splurging on a baremetal dedicated system.
If I may, I find LUXVPS to be quite capable and responsive hosts.
Black Luxury Deal #1
4 vCores (Xeon Gold 6150) 26 GB DDR4 RAM 150 GB Raid 1 NVMe 1 Gbit internet speed | 40 TB Traffic 1x IPv4 1x /64 IPv6 3.2Tbit Premium DDoS Protection 24/7 Ticket Support 4 Backups For ONLY 10€/Mo (recurring)I’ve never used Hetzner, and I don’t know what you are hosting, but I’m sold on LuxVPS. I also use Contabo, and Ethernet Services. The latter would indeed be bare-bare-metal as there are no frills. However, for a test server and for $35 a year, it works.
Currently rewriting my homelab into terraform and adding some redundancies using cloud environments, in case of power outages or network issues.
A couple things I’ve been working on
First, I spun up a larger VPS to consolidate two smaller ones. This time I dockerized almost everything. Still a docker newb, but karakeep, redmine, mbin, lemmy (still deciding which I want), davical. Asterisk and postfix/dovecot are probably gonna stay on the vps root. I’m using zfs and compression. Interestingly, the postgres database that everything is using seems to get better compression than the mail spool.
A couple weeks ago I picked up a NetApp 7 bay disk shelf for $30. It uses fibre channel (AT-FCX) controllers and I’ve never used that before. I grabbed a $7 FC HBA (QLE2560), a 2m cable and an m2-to-PCIe adapter meant for an eGPU. The idea is to see if I can’t get the RK3588 board I’m playing with to see it. I did something similar with a $50 Dell 12 drive bay and my old C6100.
